My name is Jessica Young, and I am a poet and teacher (at the University of Michigan). I have a poetry book coming out that seeks to re-envision “Alice in Wonderland” to try to figure out why Alice was having all of those strange dreams. The book is narrative poetry, so it tells a story–it has a plot, characters, etc. It’s extensively researched to be historically accurate (e.g., the plants mentioned are all plants indigenous to the area!), though of course the plot is a little wild. And of course there are lots of Carrollian influences, like patterns and Jabberwocky poems.

I would so love if you passed on information about the book, and would absolutely welcome any comments or questions. I’m out in Michigan in the US, but anyone is most welcome to email (jessjess@umich.edu) or call (209-POE-TICS).

And if any members happen to be in NY at the moment, they are most welcome to attend my release party. It’ll be August 31st at Poets House (in NYC), from 5:30-7:30. There’s a reading followed by a reception, and both are free.

The October 2010 issue of the tri-quarterly poetry journal Blue Unicorn ($7), out of Kensington, California, contains an Alice-themed sonnet, “Hatteras Time,” by Gregory Perry. It has a quotation from Alice and the Hatter’s conversation on time as its epigram. The poem begins “We’re mad as hatters down in Hatteras.” Ruth Berman reports that the piece “draws on imagery of teatime, the Queen of Hearts, a lack of ‘much of muchness to pursue,’ and having ‘buttery time to kill.'”

Volume 1 of a new zine from Oakland and Berkeley writers, The Benevolent Otherhood, contains a nonsense poem by S. Sandrigon mentioning Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum. The new “chapbook” was released this week at a reading at Oakland’s Mama Buzz before a packed house. A limited number of the zines are available, but there is a free digital version (embedded below.) The poem in question, “Sacred Massacre”, took some inspiration from Jon A. Lindseth’s article in Knight Letter Number 83, “A Tale of Two Tweedles.” Lindseth traced the etymology of ‘tweedle’ and ‘dum/dub’ back to poems referencing “the sound of the bagpipe” and “the roll of drums”. “Sacred Massacre” uses these military sounds in every stanza, and compares the dangerous biblical feud between “a king & a baby” to Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee’s argument, “All over a rattle”. (Full disclosure: the poet is also an editor of this blog.) “Sacred Massacre” is on page 32:

The September 2010 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction hits newsstands today. The two poems in this issue both use Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland themes as their central metaphors. “The Now We Almost Inhabit” by Roger Dutcher and Robert Frazier uses the Cheshire Cat and Alice’s changing size “as images of changable realities”, and Ruth Berman’s poem “Egg Protection” (mistakenly called “Egg Production” in the table of contents) uses “the pigeon’s opinion of long-necked Alice as a predatory serpent as the opinion of birds in general regarding humans.” (Quotes describing the poems from Ruth Berman.) Here’s an excerpt from “Egg Protection”:

For about two weeks, two robins
Kept yelling at me
Every time I appeared outside the door
In (apparently) a cloud
Of flames and brimstone
Visible to birdseyes,
To grab the paper or the mail.

[…]

Like Alice, I have eaten eggs, certainly,
But I don’t want theirs.
Birds consider only the first bit.
They don’t take a human’s word for the rest.